Brand New Potatoes!

New potatoes are just that-new! And they’re probably my favorite crop of the year. We’re picking some rosemary this week too so that we can make one of my favorite recipes possible for you; Here’s our strategy for our potato crop:

Potatoes are a great crop because they can be an integral and satisfying component to so many recipes and I like to grow a couple of tons of them. But if potatoes are going to be harvested to be stored for use over a long period of time so that they can be used as needed they must be “cured.” Not that they’re “sick.”

Potato plants do make fruits with seeds, but we don’t plant potato seeds. Instead, we plant “seed potatoes,” which are pieces of potato with viable “eyes,” or buds, that will sprout new foliage. A potato is a tuber, a starchy, engorged stem, not a root. When we plant a piece of stem we’ll get a new crop of potatoes that are a clone of  the original potato plant. The potato pieces we plant sprout and grow into bushy plants that reach about two feet high, and when they start to bloom we know that they are setting a new crop of potato tubers underground. Red skinned potatoes make rose colored flowers. Yellow and white potatoes have white blossoms, and purple potatoes have purple flowers. If these flowers get pollinated they will eventually form small, hard green fruits full of seed that resemble their tomato cousins, but we don’t worry about them. Instead, we wait for the potato plants to turn yellow, then wilt, and  “die back.”

Of course, the mature potato plants are not really dying when they mature. As the potato vines are shriveling up, what’s really happening is that the young potato tubers under the ground are withdrawing the vitamins and minerals from the leaves above and storing them, and all that extra nutrition goes towards making the tuber a repository of energy that will be available to power the next generation of foliage to sprout when the time comes. As the soil dries out the skin of the buried tuber dries out too, becoming the tough jacket that will cloak and protect the potato and prevent wilting. When all the energy has been withdrawn from the old foliage and the skin has firmed up then the potato is said to be “cured” and it can last underground until the conditions are right for it to sprout anew. We won’t leave them in the ground because we don’t want to feed the gophers and beetles and wild pigs. We’ll dig the potatoes up and store them in a dark, cool, dry place. Potatoes aren’t very smart, so they won’t know the difference between the soil and the storage shed and they’ll wait happily enough for the conditions to be right to sprout anew.

When we’re sorting and washing our potato crop for you we will take out all the potatoes that were damaged in harvesting, or were maybe chewed on by a beetle or gopher, or are sun scalded on one side. Another farmer might throw them away or feed them to the pigs, but I save them. I like to make an early, thick planting of these cull potatoes that are too ugly to sell. When I see this crop flower I know there is a swarm of tiny potatoes growing underground. Once the young potatoes have swollen to about the size of golf balls we’ll dig them up as “new potatoes.” The gophers, beetles, and wild pigs that would gobble up our potato crop are not stupid; they know that there is almost nothing on earth as succulent and tasty as a fresh, young potato.

These new potatoes are not cured. We are plucking them from under green plants. The skins are so tender that sometimes  we can’t wash these new potatoes or we’ll remove the skins by accident and spoil them. We let the cooks wash the new potatoes right before they prepare them. New potatoes will wilt quickly or rot after being harvested, just like broccoli, lettuce, or any other fresh vegetable. But new potatoes are so tender and tasty that storage isn’t an issue- they’ll be eaten too quickly for storage to be an issue. I like mine prepared very simply by washing them, splashing them with olive oil, sprinkling them with a bit of minced, fresh rosemary and roasting them at 350 until they’re ready. New potatoes don’t take long to cook.

For our main crop of cured potatoes we plant certified disease free seed potatoes that we buy from seed dealers each year. We could harvest new potatoes from this main crop as well but we’d probably lose a lot of money doing it. We need to let the main potato crop get as mature as possible to guarantee ourselves the biggest yield if we’re going to cover our costs and make a little profit. New potatoes are a treat, a luxury, almost a novelty, that you never find in stores, but it would be hard to make them pay without charging an arm and a leg. We could say that spring is “new potato season” but it’s really more of a moment. And that time is now.